French police accused of joining in Spain's dirty war against Basque separatists

During the 1980s, the Spanish government launched a dirty war against members of the Basque paramilitary separatist group ETA by creating an assassination organization that hid behind the name of GAL (for Anti-terrorist Liberation Groups). Between 1983 and 1987, the GAL killed 27 people and wounded 30 others, including innocent bystanders, in a campaign of assassinations and car bombings that spread terror across the Basque regions of northern Spain and south-west France. While it was later established how the GAL were led and funded by the Spanish government and police services, it is now alleged that numerous French police officers were recruited into the GAL hit squads to carry out murders on their own patch. Former Spanish deputy police commissioner and convicted GAL operative José Amedo Fouce has published a book in which he recounts terrorist actions committed by French police officers, and how their covert roles were covered up on high. He provides further detail in this interview with Karl Laske, including the key role of a French officer in a number of killings and whose true identity remains a secret today.

José Amedo Fouce says that it is high time former French interior ministers were publicly called to account over what they knew of French police participation in the four-year campaign of murders, bombings and kidnappings organised by the Grupos Antiterroistas de Liberacion, the GAL, between 1983 and 1987.